


The Fuzbi Organ

by ckret2



Series: Alastor Week [6]
Category: Hazbin Hotel (Web Series)
Genre: Crack, Furby Organ, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25797040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Charlie thinks that the hotel's guest and staff could benefit from having a little more music in their afterlives. Alastor is ecstatic to have the opportunity to expand the array of instruments he can play.And then he discovers the most awful, wonderful, baffling instrument he's ever seen.
Series: Alastor Week [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1863841
Comments: 13
Kudos: 114





	The Fuzbi Organ

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Alastor Week](https://twitter.com/SchwiftyChicka/status/1275649386781999107) Day 6: " **Instruments** /Cooking"!
> 
> For context: Vivzie joked at one point that Alastor has a Furby organ. If you have not yet been introduced to this absolutely amazing bit of lore, [here's what the Furby organ looks/sounds like](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o). And [here's some fanart](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/189272872787/creaturecandies-ive-been-meaning-to-draw) of Alastor at this noble instrument.

"Music!" Charlie said. She pointed at a whiteboard that said "MUSIC!" surrounded by a rainbow array of musical notes and hearts.

Angel and Vaggie regarded it with varying levels of dismay.

"Music is great for helping people express their feelings! It'll be a fantastic way to—you know—process your emotions, give you a more productive way to get out all the energy you could be spending on sinning..."

Angel raised a hand. "Is this gonna end in a musical number?"

Charlie stared at him, an awkward smile fixed on her face. "Well," she said. "I mean. I guess we _could_ do something else."

Angel rolled his eyes and groaned.

Vaggie stroked her chin. "Well—okay, no forcing guests to do musical numbers—"

"Thank you!"

"—but music... isn't a bad idea. It's therapeutic."

Charlie's face lit up. "Great! So I was thinking we could go get instruments, and—"

"I think it's a _spectacular_ idea!"

All three of them jumped as Alastor skidded across the floor up to Charlie's side, slung an arm around her shoulders, and gestured excitedly with his microphone cane. "It could be beautiful! Imagine it: the hotel, full of music!"

Charlie's face lit up. Angel and Vaggie exchanged a look of terror.

"We could start a _jazz band!_ " Alastor squeezed Charlie's shoulders excitedly. "Who can play what?! I can pl—Charlie! You can sing!"

"I _can!_ "

"Superb!" He pointed at Vaggie. "What about you?!"

Vaggie opened her mouth.

Alastor cut in before she could answer. "We'll get you drums! You can learn drums! You seem like you could benefit from hitting something over and over."

"Excuse me?!"

"You're excused. Angel!"

Before Alastor could talk over him, Angel said, "Trumpet—!"

Ecstatically, Alastor said, " _I_ can play trumpet!" A ghostly trumpet arpeggio played over his words.

"—and accordion," Angel finished.

Even more ecstatically, and so excited his voice cracked and the audio cut out a moment, Alastor said, "My grandf—Th— _My grandfather_ played the accordion!"

"Oh," Angel said, blinking in surprise, "yeah?"

"Yes! I hated him! I mean—" Alastor's voice darkened, "— _really_ hated him." A disembodied gunshot rang out, making the other three jump. Alastor's voice immediately brightened again. "But I _love_ the accordion! Can you play—? No, of course you can't. I can teach you!" Alastor finally let go of Charlie so he could grab Angel's wrists. "Look at you, you could play two at once!"

"No I can't."

"That's fine, how many accordions do we really need at once?" Alastor whirled around to face Charlie again, clasping his hands gleefully around his cane. "When are we going?!"

Charlie blinked. "'Going'?"

"To get instruments, of course! What, you don't expect us to make music by standing around _pretending_ we're playing, do you?" Alastor illustrated this concept by whipping his cane up to tuck the mic under his chin and pantomime with his other hand as if he was quickly bowing a violin; a few frantically fast notes of Vivaldi played out. "I suppose that works for _me_ , but I doubt the rest of you could keep up. So yes! Instruments!"

Charlie looked hopefully at Vaggie. Vaggie grimaced, but said, "I guess money isn't a problem, but..."

" _Vaggie_." Charlie grabbed her hands. "Vaggie. We could get a _piano_ for the _lobby_."

Vaggie winced. "Ooh. That would be _super_ classy, wouldn't it."

"Oh, I love that!" Alastor gushed. "Really brings me back to the days I worked in Storyville. Any brothel worth visiting had a piano in the lobby or a band in the bar!"

"Hold on, hold on, hold on. You worked in a brothel?" Angel demanded. " _You_ worked in a brothel?! You worked in a _brothel?!_ "

"Yes, yes, and yes!"

" _What_ —"

"Come on!" Alastor dismissed his cane with a puff, grabbed Charlie and Vaggie's hands, and dragged them to the door. "We're not getting any younger! Let's get this jazz band rolling!"

###

Golden Fiddle Music was the best store for musical instruments in Hell. With a staff of specialists ranging from a host of famed damned instrument makers to a veritable army of musicians who'd sold their souls in exchange for unparalleled musical talent, nowhere in Hell could one find a music store with a staff that better understood their products—and the quality of the products themselves were comparably lofty. If one wanted a piano worthy of playing to kings and queens or a violin whose sound could make angels weep (disclaimer: Golden Fiddle Music is not responsible for the fate of any violinists who attempt this trick during an extermination), then Golden Fiddle Music was the place to go.

However, Golden Fiddle Music also had a shotgun loaded with angelic buckshot and a "shoot on sight" order for the Radio Demon, who had an irritating tendency to come into the store during peak business hours, take up all the display instruments with his traveling band of raucous shadows, perform an elaborate musical number, and then leave without buying anything.

So instead they went to Chaz's Instrument Resale.

"I thought this place was Axel's Instrument Resale," Alastor said to Chaz.

Chaz blinked at him, slowly jawing a mouthful of chewing tobacco.

"Where's Axel?" Alastor prompted.

"Shot him," Chaz said. He leaned over and drooled a wad of tobacco into the tuba he'd been using as a spittoon. "Chopped him up."

"Ambitious!" Alastor said approvingly, then wandered over toward the hotel crew. As he passed Vaggie and Charlie, he muttered, "Don't try out the tubas."

"Hey," Charlie waved to get Alastor's attention before he left, "we're trying out a couple of pianos, we could use a third opinion on how they sound." She gestured at two battered grand pianos, one of which she was sitting in front of and the other of which Vaggie was standing at. "I think mine has kind of a mellow sound," Charlie played three notes, "and Vaggie's is brighter." At Charlie's nod, Vaggie played three notes. "I think the brighter sound is more optimistic—which is good, it'll help guests think happy thoughts."

Vaggie said, "And I think the mellow sound might be more... relaxing? Soothing?"

"Oh! You want me to resolve a lover's dispute! Ha! No thank you. I'm not a fool."

Charlie groaned. "Please? We asked Angel and he said he couldn't even hear a difference."

"Did he really? That doesn't bode well for his accordion playing, does it." Alastor sighed. "Well, fine!" He played back the sounds of each piano being played a couple of times. "First of all, I wouldn't call those sounds 'bright' and 'mellow'; I'd call them 'bright' and 'wildly out of tune.'"

"Well—okay, but is it a _mellow_ wildly out of tune?"

Alastor considered the question. "I suppose..."

"Great! So, which is better for the lobby?"

"The one that we know is capable of being tuned."

Charlie and Vaggie glanced at each other. Vaggie said, "Yeah, okay, he's got a point."

"Happy to help!" Alastor breezed past them, continuing to explore the store.

He liked to pick up a new instrument every couple decades or so. So far, he'd figured out the violin, the piano, the trumpet, the sax, and—if it counted—the voice; and he was long overdue to pick up another. Lifting his microphone to speak into it directly, he asked, "Which instruments are on my 'to learn' list?"

"Well," the microphone said, "you've got your clarinet."

A clarinet solo faintly played. "Right." Alastor considered the wisdom of trying to buy secondhand clarinet reeds at an instrument shop and pushed it to the bottom of his list.

"Double bass, guitar, trombone..."

The sounds of double bass and guitar riffs were abruptly cut off by a the loud blat of a trombone. "Oh! Imagine trying to learn the trombone in a hotel! Everyone would _hate_ me!" He glanced around. "Are there any for sale?"

"Hey, Smiles!"

"Yes!" Alastor turned toward Angel.

Angel, grinning impishly, was holding a trumpet in one set of hands and an accordion in the other. "Check this out!" He took a deep breath, readied the accordion, and started playing a tango on both at the same time.

Alastor watched, practically paralyzed in place, as Angel loudly and shakily blasted out a short tango song. The second the song ended, Alastor's invisible studio audience applauded wildly.

Breathing heavily and grinning broadly, Angel spread his arms wide. "And I have _never_ done that before!"

"And you should never do it again!" The studio audience laughed. "I apologize, I saw the opportunity and couldn't resist. It sounded truly terrible! Keep practicing!"

"Am I being encouraged or discouraged, here?"

"Oh, most definitely encouraged. I know a thing or two about intimidating sights, and I can think of few more intimidating than a four-armed man wielding both an accordion and a trumpet who actually knows what he's doing with them."

"Good," Angel said. "Cuz if you were discouraging me, I woulda practiced anyway, but only when you were in the room."

"You'll regret that when I find a trombone." Reminded of his original quest, Alastor passed Angel and headed into one of the store's backrooms. There was absolutely no rhyme or reason to this store. "Tubas here, trumpets there," he muttered to his microphone, meandering down a dimly-lit hallway lined on both sides with battered old instruments, "if the brass instruments were scattered that wildly then the trombones could be _anywhere_ —"

He was stopped by the sight of an electric piano. Usually, an electric piano wouldn't catch his attention—if Alastor wanted to listen to a machine attempting a pre-recorded approximation of what a piano was supposed to sound like, he'd listen to a _real_ piano recorded on a phonograph record—except that _this_ one had rows of fifty-odd small taxidermy animals attached to it. And _that_ was an unusual find in an instrument store.

The creatures looked like some sort of hellish cross between fat pigeons and fat rodents. Bulging closed eyes, round beaks, fur-covered bodies in a multitude of colors, nearly-hairless toes and tails, and little tufts of hair sitting between pairs of horns. He was trying to figure out whether or not he'd previously encountered this particular infernal species before when he realized that they appeared to be made of artificial fur and plastic parts. Toys, not taxidermy. What a disappointment. But what were they doing here? Were they a pretend audience to watch the pianist play?

His attention drifted from the toys to the keyboard; and then he noticed a label on the keyboard identifying it as an organ. That changed things. An electric organ was an entirely different beast from an electric piano, wasn't it? Alastor had seen a few of those when he was alive—even one wired up to play music over at telephone line for a remote audience to hear, back before radio was doing the same thing but better. An electric organ didn't play a pre-recorded sound like an electric piano, it just used electricity to move the mechanisms that made the sounds. A substitute for air pumped through the pipes on a more conventional pipe organ. Alastor had no objections to _that_. Electric organs were fine.

He'd never played an electric organ before.

He wondered whether this one was plugged in.

Alastor searched the controls above the keyboard for a power switch; his gaze finally landed on a toggle that was labeled with marker, "Mass Awakening." His gaze moved from the switch to the rows upon rows of toys. No. Not a chance. Maybe?

He flipped the switch.

All fifty-odd pairs of eyes snapped open and glowed menacingly. Some of their long tails twitched. The rows of toys came alive with the sound of squeaking creaking animatronic parts as their painted eyes roved back and forth and their plastic beaks snapped open and shut. Over the plastic clatter, they let out discordant high-pitched prerecorded coos, like a whole crowd of babies that had been woken up at once. Alastor watched them with a dropped-jaw grin.

"This thing," Alastor's cane said, "is _definitely_ haunted."

"Haunted by what?" Alastor asked. "We're the dead and all the ghosts are trapped here with us."

"Yeah? I think I see fifty-odd ghosts right in front of us."

"Well, let's find out whether these ghosts moan." Alastor pressed down a key.

One of the toys let out a single, sustained, unchanging, "AAAAH—"

Alastor took his finger off the key. The toy fell silent. Alastor bit his lower lip.

"Oh no," his cane muttered.

Alastor pressed two more keys. Two toys yelled at once, "AAAAAAAAH—"

Alastor's snort of laughter was buried under a burst of static. "Okay," he muttered, cracking his knuckles, trying to think of a song he could immediately play by memory. "Let's get serious."

"On your marks," his cane said. "Get set..."

At the sound of a starting pistol, Alastor took off playing "Charleston." The room was immediately filled with sonorous screaming "AAH-AAAH-AAH-AAAH-AH-AH—"

Alastor made it three measures before he was wheezing too hard from laughter to play.

###

"I think it would be cool," Charlie reassured Vaggie.

"You sure?" she asked, eyeing the ice blue electric guitar currently slung over her shoulder. "I dunno—I've always _wanted_ to, but where am I going to find time to learn to play around helping running the hotel?"

"We could work learning to play _into_ running the hotel! We could do group music practice nights." Charlie gasped. "We could start a _rock band_."

Vaggie tried not to smile and failed. "You might be getting a little ahead of yourself, hon. Although a band _would_ be pretty awesome..." Her smile faded as she tilted her head. "Hold on, do you hear that?"

Charlie paused. "That's a _lot_ of voices for a store this small." She glanced around suspiciously. "Hey, Angel?"

Angel was sitting cross-legged on the floor flipping through a tattered book of polka sheet music for accordion. He glanced up. "What?"

"Where's Alastor?"

Angel shrugged.

"Hmm..." Charlie followed the sound of voices, Vaggie trailing behind her, heading to one of the doors leading deeper into the store.

They didn't make it far down a dim hallway before they were blocked by a thick throng of living shadows, all huddled around an unseen central point, laughing loudly. "I think we found Alastor," Charlie muttered, and Vaggie nodded. Charlie cleared her throat and raised her voice. "Um, excuse me? Could we get through?"

A couple of the nearest shadows turned to look at her with empty glowing eyes, and the crowd quickly slid aside like curtains parting to reveal, at the center—

"Are those Furbies?" Vaggie asked.

Charlie gave her a weird look. "You mean the Fuzbies?"

Vaggie blinked in bafflement, silently mouthing the word "Fuzbies" to herself.

Seated at a keyboard in front of the Fuzbies, Alastor was laughing so hard his shoulders were shaking and his eyes were starting to tear up. When he caught sight of Charlie and Vaggie out of the corner of his eye, he quickly wiped his eyes with one hand and waved with the other. "Oh! L—ladies! L-look, you—you absolutely _must_ see—Listen!"

He cleared his throat, placed his hands on the keyboard, and after a pause to steel his nerves, and started playing "Toccata and Fugue."

The Fuzbies bellowed out the sinister opening notes in a chorus of cutesy "WAA-AAH-AHHH, AH-AH-AH-AHHH-AAAH—"

Which was about how far Alastor got before he was laughing too hard to play. The only reason he was still audible at all over his studio audience's cackling was because of how loud how own laughter was. He sagged helplessly onto the keyboard, one arm across the keys and his head dropped down on it. A large mass of Fuzbies obediently started screaming, " _AAAAAAAAAH—_ "

"No no no!" Without lifting his head, Alastor lifted his free hand and blindly patted the nearest Fuzbi's fluffy tuft of hair. "Quiet, qu-quiet, don't—" His protests dissolved into wheezes of breathless laughter.

Charlie circled behind Alastor to examine the Fuzbi organ, found the "Mass Awakening" switch, and flipped it off. The Fuzbies cooed sleepily as they shut their glowing eyes and turned off. Charlie put a hand on Alastor's shoulder and gently asked, "Are you going to be okay?"

Brokenly, he said, "Give me a minute."

"You heard the monster," the microphone snapped. "Back off, give him a little room to breathe!"

"Right, yeah. Sure." Charlie backed up and gave Vaggie a look.

Vaggie had her arms crossed and her lips pressed tightly together as she tried not to smile. She jerked her head toward the door back to the main store. Charlie nodded and followed her.

They'd just left the dark hallway when they heard the murmur of the Fuzbies powering up again and, a moment later, Alastor cackling stupidly.

###

Charlie checked the handwritten receipt Chaz had scrawled out for them. "Okay, so that's one grand piano, an electric guitar, a trumpet, an accordion, one guitar lessons DVD, two books of accordion sheet music..." She reviewed the list again, then looked at Alastor. "Don't you want to buy the Fuzbi organ?"

Alastor raised his eyebrows. "Why would I do that?"

Charlie blinked in surprise. "Uh. Well—it seemed to make you really happy? I thought you might want to bring it back with us?"

"Ha! No, I meant why would I _buy_ it? It's already back at the hotel."

"Alastor! Did you steal it?!"

"Shamelessly!"

"You can't keep it without paying for it!"

"I think whether or not it's paid for is going to be up to you, isn't it?" He tauntingly played a cash register noise, then trotted to the door to wait outside.

Charlie sighed heavily and turned to Chaz. "How much for the Fuzbi organ?"

He blinked slowly. "The _what_ organ?"

###

Sometimes, in the dead of night—like the eerie melodies of the phantom of the opera haunting the Parisian Opéra Populaire—residents could hear Fuzbi singing echoing through the Happy Hotel's halls.

**Author's Note:**

> Songs!
> 
> \- There's not a whole lot of accordion and trumpet duets, so mainly because it's the first one I found I'm using [Libertango](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_vvrZHGk5c) as the song Angel played—except much worse because he hasn't practiced in ages and has never tried to play trumpet and accordion at the same time.
> 
> (Side note: all the instruments Alastor and Angel were listed as able to play come from stream info. As far as I've seen, Vaggie's never been identified as playing any instruments, but we're told she enjoys Latin music and 80s rock, so from the 80s rock I decided maybe she thinks learning the guitar is cool.)
> 
> \- [Charleston](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX1Y-xr36A4), which usually isn't played on keyboard, so here's a piano version to approximate what it would have sounded like if Alastor hadn't been playing on a Furby organ.
> 
> \- [Toccata and Fugue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho9rZjlsyYY), AKA the most menacing organ song in history that wasn't played by Davy Jones. (The overture from Phantom of the Opera is in a close third place.) Definitely ill-suited for a Furby chorus. Side note: I'm always looking for _more_ menacing organ songs, so if you know of any good ones, hit me up.
> 
> \- And bonus, for the curious, [here](https://www.instagram.com/p/CDV8wQsg5Te/) is what the canonical "Fuzbi" of Hell looks like. Its brand name was given as Fuzbi instead of Furby in an in-character Picarto stream hosted by the Blitzo Instagram account.
> 
> Post for this fic available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/625944448480804864/the-fuzbi-organ) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/ckret2/status/1292317140763267073?s=20). If you enjoyed the fic, comments/reblogs there are highly appreciated (as are comments here)!


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